So it’s January, also known as “wasted gym membership month.”
We all know that many of us will be setting admirable, ambitious goals for the year, and will start off really well with great intentions. And we will then proceed to fall off catastrophically in about one week or so if we’re lucky. We’ll then go back to being obese, illiterate slobs with 9 hours of screentime per day.
So to end this annual recurring nightmare, I decided to take a deep dive into what the research says about actually sticking to your New Year’s resolutions. Here are 8 scientifically-proven methods and principles to stick to your goals better this year. And note, some of these might sound like common sense, but we sometimes need common sense to be said out loud just to remind ourselves of the obvious from time to time.
1. Make The Good Habit Suck Less
What makes sticking to good habits so hard?
Answer: they’re hard.
Going to the gym doesn’t feel good. Of course the benefits feel good – you feel great immediately afterwards when you’re going home with a pump. It feels nice to be healthy, and to have people complimenting you on your appearance after you get in shape months later. But at the very start, it sucks – you’re just an unfit person, out of breath, sweating like a pig with your body full of lactic acid. It’s not a pleasant experience. And by contrast, eating chocolate and sitting on the couch is a pleasant experience – it feels great.
And this applies to any other good habit – reading James Joyce’s Ulysses is boring compared to YouTube Shorts or playing videogames. Trying to quit porn is less of an immediately fun experience than indulging in porn. Doing the wrong thing is almost always easier than doing the right thing.
So if we understand this principle, our goal should be to make the good habit suck less. And we can achieve this in a number of ways. For example, instead of just white-knuckling temptations and trying to cut them out of your life entirely, we should instead try to harness them and use them to our advantage by only allowing ourselves to indulge in a guilty pleasure while doing the hard part of the resolution. So for example, if your goal is to exercise more, you should only listen to your favourite podcast or binge-watch a programme you like while on the treadmill.
This obviously makes the good activity feel less like a gruelling chore because it’s combined with instant gratification, which counter-intuitively turns your procrastination into productivity. Because if you’re going to sit there watching Friends re-runs of Ross Geller shouting at Joey Tribbiani anyway, then you might as well be on the rowing machine when you do it, right?
If you can find a way to do your goal that is slightly less efficient, but which is pleasant and enjoyable, then you’re much more likely to stick to it. And think about it, which is better: the perfect, most efficient habit that you don’t stick to, or a moderately effective habit that you do stick to. Clearly, the one that keeps you coming back is better.
Now obviously use your common sense here – you don’t want to make your reward after a session of cardio training “I get to eat a tub of icecream afterwards” – clearly, that defeats the purpose. But within reason, you can utilise this to great effect, and there’s lots of research to back this up.
As a related side note, you can take this a step further and make the bad habit that you want to avoid suck more. If you want to eat less junk food, you could set a goal like “I’m only allowed to eat junk food that I buy from this shop far away from my house, and I have to walk there and back.” By making it a pain in the ass, you add friction that can assist your willpower.
2. Use ‘If-Then’ Protocols To Account For Unforeseen Disasters
Life is full of disasters and crises. So it’s good to pre-plan “if-then” responses to different situations, which will help to automate new behaviours and break old ones without conscious effort on your part. So what do I mean by this?
Well, let’s say your goal is to work out in the morning when you wake up first thing to get it out of the way. But then all of a sudden, your morning gets taken up with something anomalous – you have to catch a flight, your child has an accident you need to attend to – whatever.
Now your script that said “I will work out in the morning” is out the window. You have no plan. So what are you going to do? You could try to freestyle it and say “OK, maybe I’ll work out later after lunch, but then I’ll have to shower, and I won’t have a pair set of clothes with me at the office. Maybe I could do it in the evening, but then my stomach will be full and I’ll have to wait for that to settle…” You’ll come up with all kinds of crap, and over analyse it, and then just not do it.
So what you need is contingency plans, where you say “If X goes wrong, then I’ll do Y. If I can’t work out in the morning, I work out last thing at night before bed.” Something like that. So when you’re planning your goal and resolution, think of the likely points of failure. You want to eat clean; well, your mother is probably going to come over at some point with a box of biscuits, because she always does. So what are you going to do when that happens? Well, you come up with a protocol that says “If there’s a box of biscuits in the house, I tell everyone ‘I’m on a diet’ and I refuse.”
“If I don’t have time to do a full workout, I do 20 pushups before bed.”
You can also tie your new habits to old habits that you already have. So you brush your teeth every morning. You can come up with a new goal that says “After I brush my teeth, I take out the bins.” Now it’s tied to something that you’re already in the habit of doing, so you’re more likely to stick to it.
3. Set Specific, Measurable Goals
Most of us start the year with goals that are, frankly, a bit too blurry to actually follow. We say things like, “I want to get in shape,” or “I want to read more,” or “I’m going to be better with my money this year.”
The problem with these is that they aren’t really goals, they’re just “vibes.”
When a goal is vague, it’s incredibly easy to accidentally lie to yourself. If your goal is just to “be healthier,” then taking the stairs once on a Tuesday feels like a win, even if you spent the rest of the week eating pizza over the sink. (Speaking from experience here, as someone who has eaten Koka noodles directly out of the pot to avoid having to clean dishes. My wife appreciated that one).
Your brain is naturally wired to find the path of least resistance, and a vague goal gives you a massive loophole to crawl through whenever you’re feeling tired or lazy.
To fix this, the research suggests you need to make your goals specific and measurable. You want to move away from how you feel and toward something a cold, hard spreadsheet could track.
For example:
The Vague Goal: “I want to read more.”
The Specific Goal: “I will read 10 pages of my book every night before I turn out the light.”
The Vague Goal: “I want to exercise.”
The Specific Goal: “I will go for a 20 minute walk every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:00am.”
When you do this, you take the guesswork out of it. You don’t have to wake up and have a debate with yourself about whether you’ve “done enough” today to satisfy your resolution. You either read the 10 pages or you didn’t. It’s binary.
Think of it like giving directions to a friend. You wouldn’t just tell them to “drive North for a while” and hope they find your house. You’d give them a specific address and a clear route. Treat your goals the same way. By being specific, you’re essentially being a good friend to your “future self,” making it as easy as possible for them to know exactly what they need to do to succeed.
It might feel a bit more rigid at first, but that clarity is actually what keeps you from giving up when the initial January excitement inevitably starts to fade.
Research has shown that just measuring a goal – not even trying to improve upon it, just observing and tracking the outcome – tends to lead to an improvement in results. Make of that what you will.
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Hopefully you got something out of that – good luck, Godspeed, and see you next year!